The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (23 page)

“All right, you peepul, move out. And smartly!” It was an NCO’s voice, still crisp, the kind of NCO with the kind of voice that would get Marines moving again even if their officers broke
.

“
T
hank God they don’t have artillery.”

That was Tate talking, but it could have been anyone on the line of march south from Yudam-ni along the road flanking the west shore of the big lake. With the rolling stock and the bulk of the troops using the single narrow road, a few artillery pieces could chop up the Marines at will.

But there was no Chinese artillery beyond mortars and some shoulder-carried rockets. The Chinese were moving off-road, along the ridgelines and in the parallel valleys and over the mountain passes, routes only good infantrymen and mules and their small Mongolian ponies could handle.

The Marines knew they’d gotten lucky with artillery; they had plenty themselves. They also had a few tanks and, when the weather cleared, plenty of air. The Chinese had thousands of tanks but none of them here. And there were also thousands of planes, most of them Russian, north of the Yalu. So far, so good on Chinese air: there was none.

The Marines thanked God for that, too.

As desperate as were the nightly battles when the Chinese swarmed around and over and through and sometimes swamped the Marines, dawn almost always brought respite. Unless there was heavy snow, the planes came in then off the carriers and from the airfields farther south, navy jets and Marine Corsairs and Air Force, too, and the forward observers marching and fighting with the Marines could see well enough to call in both air and artillery on the Chinese targets.

Except that the Marines were outnumbered by ten to one, the odds were otherwise in their favor.

“I feel sorry for the Chinese,” Puller impishly remarked. “They’re all around us.”

Verity wasn’t the only officer who knew the Chinese, who’d served there. Puller had as well. And the old man talked often about the past, not bragging of his exploits but dazzling in his recall of people and places and events. He told a good yarn:

“I got to Peking in ’33. February. Cold there, too. There was a Marine battalion assigned to the legation, six hundred men. I’d been there a month when they gave me command of the cavalry, what they then called the Horse Marines, a fifty-man detachment mounted on Manchurian ponies. Small horses but fine. Excellent horseflesh. I’d been a rider as a child and had been riding on and off ever since. George Patton and I probably would have gotten on well, both of us riders, both of us slightly, well, unconventional.”

Puller somehow had gotten a genuine field kitchen going here at Koto-ri, and the First Marines, those not actually in combat at the time, were given at least one hot meal a day.

“Don’t let them eat frozen rations,” he kept telling his officers. “Man eats frozen food he’ll have gastrointestinal problems for a week. And you know what that means in this weather. A man with diarrhea won’t make it. He won’t be strong enough.”

Even if you didn’t have diarrhea, his officers thought, knowing from experience what it was like to sit on a wooden ammo box in a driving snow with the temperature below zero and your trousers down around your ankles, trying to have a bowel movement.

But these dinners with Puller, served before 4:00
P.M.
with the darkness coming on and the Chinese moving up toward the Marine lines, were as pleasant under the circumstance as a meal could be. Sometimes they ate outdoors.

“Let the men use the warm-up tents,” Puller kept saying. “Won’t hurt us to eat around a fire.”

If the Chinese had real artillery, gathering a regiment’s staff around a fire would have been an invitation to slaughter. Puller wasn’t foolhardy, for all his dash; he knew what a soldier could get away with, when you could cut a corner and when not.

“First time I ever saw Japanese troops was at Peking,” he would start out, and the men around him, many of them famous Marine officers in their own right, would lean forward, wanting to hear, knowing that the story would be good. “There was this Ming shrine about twenty miles out. We drove out to see it, sightseeing, three or four officers in a closed car. In summer Peking could be one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit; in winter it could be twenty below. Nothing like it in the States except maybe North Texas, the Panhandle, where they say there’s nothing between Texas and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence.”

There was no organized liquor ration, and Puller was hell on drunkenness, had broken both officers and men for being drunk. But a bottle might be passed about, bourbon, usually, just enough for each man to have a drop. Bourbon was very Marine Corps, a southern drink, with so many of the senior officers, men like Puller from Virginia, men of the South, men of Dixie. One reason you never heard much of Marine heroics in the Civil War: half the Marines were on each side.

“So we drove out to the Ming Tombs. And there we’d find this battalion of Japanese also stationed in Peking. But they’d marched out in formation. They carried full gear, weapons, ammo, plus a bundle of firewood. They’d already marched maybe twenty miles, and when they got there they stacked arms and did exercises and then, finally, they broke off by twos and massaged each other’s neck and shoulders. After that they cooked rice and bean powder and had a primitive meal. Then they were permitted to gaze upon the
Ming Tombs before marching back to Peking. We ate a picnic lunch and went sightseeing and drove back in the most leisurely of fashions. And the damned Japs were always marching through the gates of Peking before us.

“I knew then they would be terrible adversaries in war.”

He might as well have been talking about the Chinese, who lived on nothing and marched in deep snow in sneakers and carried mortars and machine guns on their backs and could pursue all day and fight all night. Then Puller went on, finishing his little sermon: “The Marine battalion, for its part, did only one field exercise a week. And that was called off if it was too cold or too hot. Or if rain threatened.”

Puller did not draw the lesson. His tone of voice did that, manifesting disapproval and disgust.

Tom was still writing letters to Kate, not daily anymore but when he could. By now it was compulsive, near obsession, and irrational. Especially since there was no postal service.

What Tom Verity wrote his daughter was an expurgated, child’s version of the day’s events, the landscape, the shelters in which they might fortunately bivouac, the weather, how the old jeep rattled along, nothing like their MG, not at all, but all the more dear to him for its odd wheezes and clanking.

It has no top, Kate, even in rain or snow. Poor little jeep. Mr. Izzo, our driver, keeps it going whatever the weather, and we warm cans of food on the engine. We must try that someday with our car on a picnic. Some Campbell’s chicken noodle soup? You bring two mugs and spoons and napkins and we’ll heat the soup together on a cold day and then sit in the car and eat our soup and be toasty warm together
.

Did I tell you Mr. Izzo is very short and rather small and wears sunglasses even at night and his friends call him Mouse? Isn’t that a funny name for a man?

Love
,
Poppy

Since there was no postal service, he would fold each letter carefully, pressing it very flat, and jam it into an inner pocket. And he wrote about everything but the killing.

The battalion commander, a light colonel, was crying.

“It’s the wounded. What the hell do you do with the wounded?”

Verity didn’t know the colonel’s name. He was from one of the other rifle regiments. It didn’t matter. He could have been any of the battalion commanders. None of them knew what to do with the wounded. The casualty lists were themselves becoming a disaster within the larger, looming catastrophe.

We may just not make it
, Verity thought, clearheaded and almost calm. It was a possibility that had to be considered, if not spoken aloud. Who knew what small thing it might take to send even Marines into panic and headlong flight or surrender? The Chinese army might really kill or capture them all.

He and the battalion commander were standing at a narrow place in the road where snow sliding down from the hill had once again cut the route south. They were using a tank as a snowplow, running it back and forth, pushing at the snow and tamping it down flat, the engine whining, the gears rasping dry, metal against metal, since lubricating oil only froze and it was better to run machinery dry.

“Maybe a ’dozer will come along,” Verity said, not really believing it but not knowing what to say to a colonel on the brink of breaking down.

The man brightened. “Yeah, maybe it will. We could use a ’dozer. If we had a ’dozer we could get out.”

There was an edge of panic in his voice.

He was sure right about the wounded. That wasn’t panic; that was reality.

Maybe we ought to stand and fight
, Verity thought. That way they could dig in, get out of the wind and out of the line of fire, build fires, put up warming tents, get warm. Straggling along the mountain road like this in the cold and under fire, they were losing men they couldn’t replace, dead and wounded.

It was December 1, three weeks to go before official winter, and they were still retreating abreast of the reservoir and hadn’t yet made Hagaru-ri.

“Someone said it’s twenty below, Captain.”

This was Tate, not a man to exaggerate.

“Feels it, Gunny.”

“Yessir. Some men are saying we should’ve stayed at Yudam-ni. That we could have made a stand there and stopped the Chinese.”

“I don’t think so, Gunny. I don’t think we’ve could have stopped them. Just too many.” He wasn’t that sure but an officer didn’t want to convey doubt.

Tate nodded, the chiseled chin firm as ever. “I think you’re right, Captain. It’s just some of these boys are cold and tired and scared out here on the open road. But I think you’re right. The Chinese would’ve overrun Yudam-ni.”

It was a theoretical concern by now. Yudam-ni lay behind them and Hagaru-ri ahead, and who knew how many of them would live to get there?

And the wounded were always with them.

Verity understood why the light colonel wept. These were his men, fifteen hundred of them. Verity had no command, just Tate and Izzo and himself and one goddamned jeep, and neither Tate nor Izzo had been hit or limped on frozen feet yet. When it was your men lying there bleeding or unable to walk, that was something else; that was where you felt the terrible weight of command. It was responsibility that broke men as much as fear. The awful burden of fifteen hundred men you were losing man by man and hour by hour and with not one goddamned sensible, useful thing to do about it. At Quantico, at the Marine Corps Schools, they taught you the “school solution” to just about everything. What was the “school solution” to Marines’ dying from loss of blood when it was so cold the plasma wouldn’t go into solution and the tubes clogged with ice and the corpsmen couldn’t change dressings with gloved, half-frozen hands rigid with cold?

Now there weren’t enough warming tents even for the wounded. Men who weren’t wounded could forget it; no warming tents for
them. With the division on the march this way, slow and punctuated by halts as it was, they no sooner got a warming tent up and the wounded into it than they were taking it down to move another mile, a half-mile, a quarter-, a hundred and fifty yards. So when they could, they put the worst wounded inside and lay the other casualties on straw mats outside the tents on the lee side away from the wind and covered them with tarps.

“One good thing,” Verity heard a surgeon say. “It’s so damned cold, blood coagulates. Just wrap ’em up the best you can and don’t move them around too much or drop them and maybe some of these boys will make it.”

When one didn’t, he was stacked like cordwood until a tank or ’dozer came along and the dead would be piled on top, as many as a tank could carry and still have a field of fire for its guns.

At Hagaru-ri, it was said, they’d carved out an airstrip. Maybe some of the wounded could get out then. Verity started to say something about this to the light colonel, but the man was crying again, tears freezing on his face, his nose running into icicles, and so Tom said nothing.

What could he say? In the War against the Japanese he’d seen officers break. Go nuts. Shoot themselves. He couldn’t recall seeing a man defeated as this light colonel was. He was like the Marines coming off the hill that morning with their parkas turned backward and their sleeves tied. Someone ought to get a replacement up here. And quick. And maybe there was no replacement. And who the hell was Captain Verity to be parceling out advice when he was here reluctantly and riding as a passenger?

“All right, you peepul, move out. And smartly!” It was an NCO’s voice, still crisp, still disciplined, the kind of NCO with the kind of voice that would get Marines moving again even if their officers broke.

The tank had done its work flattening the snowslide, and men got to their feet and picked up their rifles and shuffled on, a ghastly procession of tired men on a mountain road in the cold. But they were up; they were marching.

“Well,” Verity said to the battalion commander.

The man shook himself, making an effort. “Yes,” he said, “time to move out.” He rubbed the back of a filthy mitten across his face, smearing the snot away and trying to smile.

It didn’t really work. But he moved on. Maybe he was thirty-five; he looked older.

The three of them crouched low behind the jeep, sheltering from bomb fragments or the errant round. The Corsairs came in low and loud, pounding the Chinese on the hillside with aerial cannon, machine guns, and hundred-pound bombs. Then came the napalm, bouncing against the slope and exploding, a huge fireball first and then just the blackened snow and the reek of jellied gasoline you could smell down here on the road.

“Go get ’em, babee!” Izzo shouted. “Furioso!”